Design Exploration: Simon At Palm Place

The restaurant website at http://www.simonatpalmsplace.com/ is a full Flash website, using flash to call movies from the navigation menu, similar to our next mini-project. The website uses high quality photography to create a "super-hip, sophisticated" brand for the restaurant, with gorgeous artsy photographs of delicious food plates along with a puzzling but fascinating photo of the scantily-clad restaurateur looking a little like Angelina Jolie in a dominatrix role. The navigation features a gallery of highly artsy, appealing food photos along with more extreme attitude, scantily-clad woman. In the end, you can't help but wonder whether the owners are fabulously whimsical with a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of "simply irresistible" food and woman, or perhaps they are just entirely too full of themselves. In either event, I have no doubt that you would be drawn to this restaurant if you hope to mingle with the spectacularly chic and talented.

The navigation of the website is very simple and appealing. The imagery is "clean", attractive and creates a strong sense of place. The quality of the photography implies sophistication and high quality food and service. The incongruent photos of men and women in pink beehive hairdoes lounging poolside outside the restaurant create an allure that makes the viewer want to go there, if only just once, to see if it's really as hip as it implies. The website provides all the basic information needed for someone who would like to eat or drink at the restaurant, but the photography and attitude is the real story here.